A Hair's Tip Holding Every Land
Having recalled the completed biography, the verse turns back to what remains unfinished: measureless kalpas of practice, spoken here only in small part. What follows are the sūtra's most extreme images of scale — every land placed on a hair's tip, an ocean held in a single pore, every mountain of iron ground first to dust and then that dust ground again — before the final line admits that even this dust could be counted, while the bodhisattva's own wisdom cannot be measured at all.
Dust That Could Be Counted, Wisdom That Cannot
Every mountain of iron ground to dust, and then that dust ground down again — the verse pushes its own image of scale to what should be an unimaginable number, and then says plainly that this number, however vast, could still be known and counted. Only the bodhisattva's own wisdom, placed right beside it, is named as something no counting could ever reach.
彼諸菩薩行，無量劫修習，
廣大無有邊，我今說少分。
雖令無量眾，安住佛功德；
眾生及法中，畢竟無所取。
具足如是行，遊戲諸神通：
毛端置眾剎，經於億千劫；
掌持無量剎，遍往身無倦，
還來置本處，眾生不知覺。
"That bodhisattva's own practice, cultivated across measureless kalpas, is vast and boundless without limit; I now speak of it only in small part.
Though he causes measureless multitudes to abide in the buddha's own merit, within both sentient beings and every dharma, he ultimately takes hold of nothing at all.
Complete in practice such as this, he plays freely within every spiritual superknowledge: placing every land upon the tip of a single hair, throughout koṭis of thousands of kalpas; holding measureless lands within his palm, traveling everywhere without his body ever growing weary, and returning to set them back in their original place, with sentient beings never even aware of it.
菩薩以一切，種種莊嚴剎，
置於一毛孔，真實悉令見。
復以一毛孔，普納一切海，
大海無增減，眾生不嬈害。
無量鐵圍山，手執碎為塵，
一塵下一剎，盡此諸塵數。
以此諸塵剎，復更末為塵；
如是塵可知，菩薩智難量。」
The bodhisattva takes every kind of adorned land there is and places it within a single pore, causing it to be seen there in genuine reality, entirely and completely.
And further, within a single pore, he universally holds every ocean, the great ocean neither increasing nor decreasing, and no sentient being within it disturbed or harmed at all.
Measureless cakravāḍa mountains of iron, he grasps in his hand and crushes into dust, and for every single mote of that dust he sets down one land, exhausting the entire number of those motes.
And these lands, one for each of those motes of dust, he further grinds down again into dust; dust such as this could be known and counted, but the bodhisattva's own wisdom can never be measured."
如是塵可知，菩薩智難量 — dust such as this could be known and counted, but the bodhisattva's own wisdom can never be measured. After building an image of near-infinite scale — mountains crushed to dust, and that dust's own lands crushed to dust again — the verse still treats this staggering number as countable in principle, reserving true immeasurability for wisdom alone.
Part 825 Complete
This continues chapter thirty-eight, 離世間品, in fascicle fifty-nine. Part 826 completes Samantabhadra's closing verse and, with it, both chapter thirty-eight and fascicle fifty-nine — closing on a single light within one pore illuminating what sun, moon, and every star combined cannot, and a final charge to whoever would take up this practice.